This is something that I miss about forums of yore and sort of hate about HN, Reddit, and their ilk: the deprioritization of a post author's identity. It took me way too long to figure out you were talking about the username of the person you were replying to. I miss being able to scan through a forum's post listing and readily pick out names of posters I recognized after being involved in the site for a while. It was an additional signal of post quality (or lack thereof, depending on the user). Here, the username is hidden in a sentence of status text, on the same visual level of the number of minutes ago the post was made, all of which is rendered in a light grey font. It's clearly intentional, and I can't for the life of me figure out why the forum owners don't want users to be able to build a consistent identity.
I made a quick little userscript that allows you to attach tags to users on HN. There's pretty much no documentation, I didn't really expect to release it, but it puts a little [t] next to usernames on HN and you can click it to add tags that persist in localstorage and show up next to that user wherever they post on HN. Feel free to use it and adapt it however you like. Only tested on Firefox and I'm sure it's full of bugs and unintended side effects!
Wow. You make excellent points, I never realized it was intentional how the usernames blend in on the page on HN and Reddit. This is fascinating! Is it that usernames distract from the content?
wikipedia, the world's highest authority on matters of nitpicking, says camel case can be either; capitalization of the first letter is unspecified.
in practice, I've certainly heard people use camel case to refer to either convention. I hear pascal case a lot when people specifically mean a capitalized first character. wikipedia lists dromedary case as the complement of pascal case, but I've never actually seen this term used IRL.
I've always seen it like camel case when it's not important if you capitalize the first letter or not and lower camel case or upper camel case if it's important.
